She stops, clears her throat and tugs at her skirt. She knows she is hurrying, cutting out the important bits, putting it far too crudely. Mr Beasely is hardly reacting, but he is listening, tapping his pen on the table now and then, turning it over between his fingers, but he is listening.
‘Well, we did bring them up in Nelson Street, and that was okay. I’ve got a daughter, Mandy, of twenty-two, she’s training to be a hotel manageress and she’s working up in Scotland now. And Kevin’s bright, like Malc. He’s at Cardiff University and he wants to be an architect.’ The turtle is pounding its flippers now, pathetically trying to scuff over its eggs with sand. She has to go on and tell it. ‘It took money to bring them up and pay the rent and heat the house… and it happened that there was never a time when Malc could risk changing his job, even though it was obvious that Watt & Wyatt weren’t ever going to promote him. And then, after Malc’s mother died, we had his dad to cope with and that wasn’t easy. It took away a lot of our energy. So we just sort of stuck… you know, it happens so easily. And then we were in this kind of rut. I accepted it, I suppose, that’s how I helped to diminish Malc, by accepting it. And so he got angry and bitter with all the futility of it. For the last ten years the job he’s hated has never even been safe, and he’s gone to work looking over his shoulder.’
‘Ah, romance has gone,’ says Mr Beasely glibly.
And Ellie reproves him quickly. ‘I’m talking about a damn sight more than romance here,’ she says.
‘Other people made it,’ says the manager. ‘Other people with the same problems that you had got out. They took risks, they made it.’
‘Oh, we know that! Do you think that fact helps Malc? We’re the only original ones left in Nelson Street, as everyone else has moved on. Don’t think I’m feeling sorry for myself, or pity for Malc. I don’t feel that way. I don’t look at it that way, not at all. We failed. Malc failed. He could have succeeded, but he didn’t. He failed, like thousands of people fail all the time without quite knowing why. And now I have the chance to turn that round, to give him back his pride and dignity and maybe some of those old hopes. And that’s the way I want to do it, don’t you see? I want him to be able to buy me presents, take out a mortgage, get himself a car. I want him to feel that he’s succeeded on his own account, and got back his self-respect. Only then will I have what I truly want, what winning a million pounds could never buy me. I’d have some of Malc back, the man I married, the man who is still there underneath but who is too afraid to show himself any more.’
‘And how do you propose to go about this great transformation?’
‘I need someone like you to help me.’
‘I will certainly help you if I can.’
‘Well then. This firm Malc works for, Watt & Wyatt, the animal food people—is there any way I can buy my way in? Is there any way I can buy myself influence without anyone knowing what I’m doing?’
‘In order to promote him?’
‘Yes, for a start, to promote him.’
‘This all sounds dangerously patronising, Mrs Freeman. If your husband should ever find out or even suspect…’
‘He won’t—how could he? And if I sound patronising to you then it’s because I haven’t talked about myself. Oh, I don’t consider myself any prize Mr Beasely, and I don’t want you thinking I do. Just look at me—I’m as jaded and battered as Malc is. The only real difference between us is that I keep on dreaming inside. I’m an optimist, that’s all, and I think I’ve turned Malc away, closed myself off from him and been living on dreams for years. That’s not very honourable, is it, really? It’s just a knack I was born with…’
‘Are you sure you’re not dreaming now?’
She looks at him sharply. ‘I don’t think I am. I think I am being practical now, and positive.’
‘Maybe you won’t like the man you turn your husband into. Maybe he won’t change, or maybe it’s too late for that. His desires may not be your desires any longer, and you could find yourselves poles apart.’
‘Even if that should happen, for good or for bad we’ll both have grown, not stayed still, decaying and no wiser in that old rut.’
‘You know, Mrs Freeman, on a professional level I would have to advise you against this…’
‘I don’t see why,’ Ellie objects. ‘You would have been perfectly happy for me to invest my money in order to make more. You would have encouraged me to make my money grow. Well, why not a person? What’s wrong with investing in a person in order to make them grow?’
‘Because your actions might well have the opposite effect.’ He is filling in a deposit form for her and asks her to write down her address. He rummages in a drawer and takes out a chequebook.
‘Keep it,’ she says. ‘I don’t want any evidence in the house. Keep everything here for me and never ever send me letters or statements. Mr Beasely, in order to have the opposite effect you are suggesting I would have to destroy him.’
‘And might you? Have you considered that you might do that?’
‘He is destroyed already, Mr Beasely. He was destroyed, as a man, years ago.’ And she signs the papers he passes over.
‘Sometimes you sound as if you love him, sometimes as if you hate him.’
‘Yes, precisely, that’s exactly how it is.’ Ellie looks at her signature and wishes it was bolder.
Mr Beasely swallows. He sits back. ‘You’ll have to give me some time to think about all this. I know several small firms which are struggling at the moment and which might well look favourably on an unnamed shareholder or a partner pumping money into their depleting funds. In exchange for the promotion of a man they do not know, however, that’s quite another matter…’
She interrupts him quickly. ‘Malc is a clever, talented man. All he has ever needed has been an opportunity. I am not trying to pass on a moron, a time-waster or a parasite. Wherever Malc goes, given the right chance, he will flourish, he’ll pull his weight. I give you my word on that, Mr Beasely, and I promise you that that is something I have never given lightly. When will you know?’
‘Give me a week,’ says the young man, standing up. ‘In the meantime, can I propose that next Wednesday we meet over lunch, a little more informally than this?’
Ellie is surprised. It is such a long time since she’s been asked out to lunch that she can’t remember the last occasion. Worrying about what she would wear she says, ‘That would be nice—but it had better be somewhere out of town. I don’t want to be seen…’
‘I quite understand. You just tell me where you’d like to be picked up.’
She thinks quickly. ‘On the top floor of the multi-story carpark behind the Arcade,’ she says. ‘I’ll be beside the exit doors, and if anyone sees me I can say I was helping someone I knew with a parcel.’
‘Twelve-thirty then,’ he tells her, peering through his spyhole before opening the door—in case there is a raid going on, she supposes.
This is a collusion. They are colluding together and she likes the feeling. She is pleased with herself. She’s been frank and open and has touched on the personal feelings she always finds so hard to discuss. Ellie waves away the burrowing little snake of thought that unsettles her, because without quite meaning to do so, she has misled the bank manager. She has allowed him to think she is kind and concerned, tenderhearted and caring, but the bit she’s left out is the fact that Malc, as he is, is the greatest threat to her own existence. Whenever she sees him she feels shackled and dragged down to earth. Only by changing Malc can Ellie change herself and that is why she can’t leave him, why he has to come with her. No matter—she’s said enough to get by.
She isn’t sure whether or not to shake Mr Beasely’s hand, but he puts his out automatically so she gives him hers quickly. His is a firm hand, and a strong one, not sweaty or clammy or anything and she feels safe holding it. And when they smile they exchange understanding. It is going to be all right. Ellie stands very straight. She might be an unsuitable person to be inside a bank, forced
into this spindly walk by those high heels, but when she walks through the plush foyer she wants to shout and clap her hands. She knows why people streak across football grounds, she feels like a millionaire with the world at her feet and she thinks the beige carpet is rather drab. It ought to be scarlet.
5
TWO WEEKS LATER AND it’s Friday night so they’re all down at the club. ‘Go for it, Dad,’ says Kevin.
Inwardly Ellie winces, outwardly she nods brightly. She’s cut out the advert and brought it along with her tonight. ‘Opportunity for quick promotion in small expanding company initially as salesman covering the Merseyside area selling quality garden accessories. Basic salary, commission and good incentives…’ And that’s enough to be going on with.
Malc delves in his pocket and brings out fifty pence which he contributes to the draw… to the ‘snowball’. There is over a hundred quid accumulated in it now. He says, ‘What’s the matter with you, woman? I’m forty. I haven’t any experience. I don’t even know anything about the product. I won’t get it.’
‘But just to try, Malc, that wouldn’t hurt.’
But even as she says it she knows that to try and fail would hurt… agonisingly. Before her big win another rejection for Malc would have hurt her, too, and she can’t tell him that he will definitely get the job. She can’t tell him that the ad has been put in the local paper expressly with Malcolm Freeman in mind.
Kev is home for the weekend, not for pleasure really, but to pick up his golf clubs. They were second-hand—Malc bought them for him on his eighteenth birthday but the two had never had enough money to join the golf club and the public one was always too full to get near on a weekend. Now he is at university, Kev has a chance to play. He would not normally accompany his parents to the club—he disapproves of the place, as Ellie does—but this evening his mother has encouraged him to come along. Eager to create the perfect atmosphere, she wants Kev’s help with the advert, thinking perhaps that mellowed by booze and with Kevin’s promptings, her husband might agree to apply in front of his friends and then be unable to draw back.
Malc is playing snooker on one of the three tables in the wooden addition to the otherwise galvanised building. He takes his shot and he shouts across to her, ‘Woman, I can’t even drive! How d’you think they’re going to take on someone who can’t even sodding drive!’
Malc might act daft sometimes but he is astute, enough to sense what a sore spot this is for Ellie. Is that why he’s flung that fact back so loudly and proudly just now? She’s never said it and of course she wouldn’t, but secretly she is ashamed that Malc can’t drive. She hates herself for her feelings, but she can’t help them—she’s always felt Malc to be less than other men because he can’t drive. She’s even heard herself telling people lately that Malc didn’t drive on moral grounds, that he despised the motor car, preferred the bus or the train and that if everyone felt this way there’d be less pollution and the country would be a more peaceful, healthier place.
Of course the reasons Malc can’t drive are nothing to do with pollution. They are to do with the fact that they’ve never had the money to pay for driving lessons and a car of their own, even the tattiest second-hand banger, has always been out of the question. Never mind the car, they couldn’t have afforded the maintenance, tax or insurance.
It isn’t Malc’s fault and Ellie has no right to feel the way she does about it.
‘They might pay for you to learn to drive, Malc’ Diana Legget’s voice is high as it drifts through pieces of ham sandwich and over the fumey paraffin airwaves towards the snooker-tabled area. The Leggets bought their own council house three years ago, and they own a caravanette which they use for foreign holidays. They bring lots of snapshots home with them and they’ve had one of themselves, almost hidden behind bougainvillea, enlarged and framed. The photograph, which hangs above their fireplace, had been taken on a hilly slope, with wild goats and a little blue lake peeping out behind them. Now the big, jolly woman nudges Ellie and winks, ‘He’ll believe anything after half a dozen beers!’
Diana looks exactly as Ellie had looked when she’d gone to the bank. Her hair is out of rollers but you wouldn’t know they’re not still in; her whole head is covered in tunnels and she’s used too much of that purplish blusher. Ellie sits with Diana and Margot Hughes, Bacardi and cokes set on the glassy round table between them and lemon slices wetting the ashtray. Malc plays snooker with his friends Dick Hughes and Dave Legget, and their glasses of beer are balanced on oval shelves built into the pinewood walls and painted ebony. Kevin drifts uneasily from one area of the club to the other, to the bar and back again, wishing, Ellie knows, that he hasn’t come. She wants him to go and stand with the men… she dreads one of Diana’s coarse conversations. If she joins in, her son, hovering there behind her shoulder, will despise her and if she doesn’t then Diana and Margot will scoff and call her snooty.
Malc and Ellie have been coming to the club like this on a Friday night for at least fifteen years. Habit, security, are important to both of them, but what part have habit and security played in Malc’s failure… and in Ellie’s?
Ellie turns round and catches Kevin’s hand. She catches something else, too, the look he is giving his father, and she winces for the second time that night. ‘Go over and talk to him about it, Kev,’ she urges, and then turns to Diana and Margot. ‘Help me persuade Malc to try. You know what an old stick-in-the-mud he is—and how he likes to show off. Maybe one of you could persuade him where I can’t.’
‘To be truthful I can’t see Malc as a salesman, Ellie,’ announces Diana, trying to control the damp ham sandwich which flops between her fingers. Her lips twitch before she continues, ‘You’ve got to possess a certain kind of charm if you want to sell anything. Showing off and being glib and silly isn’t going to get you very far with the customers.’
‘But Malc can be charming, when he chooses to be. Look how nice he was at Teresa’s wedding last year. All he needs is a little encouragement.’
‘I think a change of job would do him the world of good,’ says Margot, who is thin and delicate-looking in that see-through blouse with a bow at the throat, a speckly black like the roots of her golden hair. They favour black if they want to feel smart. All three of them favour black, and when they want to be really smart they smoke black cigarettes.
Ellie smiles at Margot. ‘So do I.’
‘But what he says is quite right,’ persisted Diana. ‘He won’t get it, because he’s too old and can’t drive. It would be a waste of time him applying.’
‘Ellie wants him to try, so the least we can do is help her.’ It is rare for Margot to come out with so firm an opinion and Ellie feels grateful. The club is never quite full, and never quite empty, although the snooker tables and dartboard are always in use. It is at its fullest tonight because of the accumulated money in the snowball. If you’re not here and your ticket comes up you lose it. Your winnings go into the next round and there aren’t many folks round here can afford to let that happen. Drinks are cheaper in here than they are in pubs. Pearl’s a Singer plays on in the background, the sad strains of it tangled up in the gargling money sounds of the gambling machine next to the jukebox, its bright lights flashing like the carousel at New Brighton fairground. A long, lean man in a too-small suit bends down over it, his wrists all bony and white, scooping up the coins in his hands with a fluid, practised gesture as a thirsty man might gather water.
Money and luck. Malc considers himself unlucky, as unlucky as that philosopher guy when an eagle spied his bald head and dropped a tortoise on it, mistaking it for a stone. Now that is bad luck, to die like that.
Betrayal. Not only is Ellie betraying Malc by sitting here like this with her mouth closed tightly round her secret, but, perhaps even worse than that, she is betraying her two closest friends. Normally there is nothing they keep from each other, sitting here, week after week, year after year, ‘girl talk’ the men call it, laughing. What talk do the men exchange as they s
tand at the bar with their beer bellies touching, and sometimes the edges of their glasses? What else do they touch? What do they swap but jokes, what other sort of exchanging ever goes on, except a few dubious tips about runners and riders, tirades about poufs, dykes and wogs, and a few mechanical hints.
Ellie is glad she’s not a man.
And yet Kevin, in a comfy tracksuit tonight, all woolly-looking except for his nylon turtle-necked sweater, is not like that. Kevin is as uneasy around his father and his friends as any woman would be. And although Malc teases him, gently mocks and discourages him, Ellie knows that secretly he is as proud of their son as she is. She’s spent many long hours in the past trying to convince Kevin of that and sometimes she thanks God that Kevin, so academically-minded, so serious and sensitive, has been blessed with a natural ability for sport. It is sport, thinks Ellie, that saved him. And sport has been the one weapon that he’s been able to use against his father.
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